


decline and fall

by subduction



Category: Rome
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-04
Updated: 2008-05-04
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:52:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subduction/pseuds/subduction





	decline and fall

There is a story your father used to tell you. A story of wolves, and pine forests, and a boy, he always said, _not so very much older than you_.

His father had told it to him in his own boyhood, he said, and it was a story of his father's country, which was somewhere far to the north; you were never quite sure where. Your father did not ordinarily speak of such things, for to be the son of a foreign-born slave was not a matter for pride. Your father's country was Rome. Your country is Rome. Mistress, mother, wife and lover.

Still, you remember the story.

*

 

The sun in Egypt is hot in a pale, pale sky, and you are forever turning your face from its blistering regard. But the day you are remembering was damp and cool.

Cool for Rome, at least — not the bitter, bone-bite chill of a February in Germania or Gaul — but then, you had not been to those places yet. On the morning you are recollecting, you were not yet a general, and Caesar was not yet Caesar. You were only boys, and you were to be tutored together.

Or: you were only a boy. Octavian, you suspect, never really was. The fact that you, at thirteen, were thrice already a man — twice with a lusty coquette of a galley slave, and once more with your sister's dark-skinned maid, whose provocative way of walking had driven you half-mad until you chanced to come on her alone one afternoon; she had moaned in some low barbarian tongue when you pushed her over a crate to enter her — all this had little bearing on the matter. One February morning with Octavian was long enough to grasp how it would be, then and ever.

It was a very great honour, you knew, to study alongside this brooding, contemptuous scion of a great family. A great honour, and one of which your father had ensured you were sensible. You wonder occasionally what he would think if he could see where his maneuvering had led you, all these years later.

You think, on the balance of things, that he would be proud.

 

*

Octavian gives very precise orders. Precise — but infinitely varied. No predicting what he will ask of you on any given day. No guessing what notions tick away behind those pale, reflecting eyes. This thing that lies, wordless but thrumming, between young Caesar and his general is not a campaign, nor a game of _latrunculi_; there is no master stratagem that governs his strange requests. None that you can discern, at any rate.

You have learned to read his signals, as once you learned Greek. Octavian had been your companion in that study, but in these matters he is the tutor. He is turned away now, as you enter the tent; his left hand clasps his right wrist behind his back, and the fingers of his right clasp a scroll. The inclination of his head is slight, downward and to the right. It increases, fractionally, as you push the curtain aside: acknowledgement. You pause to adjust your eyes to the dimness.

In Octavian's tent are low teak couches and damask curtains and a lacquered desk set with quills and ink, paper and sealing-wax. He breaks his fast there daily, receiving and dispatching missives. His sleeping-quarters are partitioned from the main area by an elegant folding screen, its panels embossed with golden eagles. You prefer a spare, utilitarian war-room, but then, Octavian has always been more conscious of symbol and appearance. The table in the centre of the tent is more to your taste: it is of heavy oak, rough-hewn edges worn smooth with use, surface pocked and nicked with the scars of the same. It is on this table that Octavian Caesar spreads the maps of his empire; it is over this table that you and he bend heads, murmuring long into the torpid desert nights as your hands manage the lives of men and the destinies of legions.

It is to this table he gestures now: only an impatient flick of the wrist, and still he does not turn to face you, but the tension writ in those narrow shoulders is clear enough. At first you think he means to bend you over it — he had you this way the night before last, hard enough to make the saddle agony the next day, and you are sure you caught him smirking when he noticed the discomfort creasing your face in the morning — but as you approach it he turns at last, and he is smiling.

 

*

You and Octavian had been studying together for three or four months before you invited him to your home. Ordinarily you would not have dreamt of such a thing — bringing the son of a noble family, the great-nephew of Julius Caesar, to break bread with your plain-spoken father and your nervous mother and your giggling sisters — but then, Octavian was not an ordinary boy. You cannot now remember how the question arose, but there you were, one lazy summer evening, reclining with goblets of wine in your hands and watching the slave-girls walk about.

You had won some award, you remember. For wrestling. Perhaps that had presented itself as the occasion; it is hard to recall. You were large even at thirteen — larger still compared to slight Octavian, whose chin, not yet angled into its full stubbornness, was covered in only the faintest of blond down — and you were a frequent champion at the Campus. You remember the award, because it was this revelation (Octavian had brought it up, of course) which had brought your mother to your side, her plain face lit with delight as she squeezed you about the shoulders and kissed your forehead. "My brave son," she called you.

When he left you that evening Octavian had clasped your arms formally, but he had looked over your shoulder, too — back into the house, candle-lit now in the deepening twilight. You'd turned to see what had caught his gaze, but there was nothing there. He'd had the oddest look on his face, though, and some time later you'd wondered — an uncharacteristic flash of insight — if he didn't, perhaps, envy you just a little.

That was, in retrospect, the night you became friends for life.

 

*

In most things he has a commanding eloquence; some instinct in him seems effortlessly to choose the right words to address any sort of man, or any number thereof. You have not, ordinarily, his facility with speech — but in the act of fucking his words fall away from him, and then even his gasps, until a fierce kind of silence wells up between your slick bodies, and you find yourself filling the quiet with rough animal noises of your own.

Tonight something is different. He had letters from Rome this morning; perhaps this is it. Perhaps the news from the Sixteenth, or perhaps nothing at all. You have long since ceased to speculate about the way of things.

In the end, he'd had you put him on the table. Not bent over it, as he'd had you the other night — legs spread like a whore's and still he kicked them farther apart, bruising your hips with his hands — instead he is on his back, knees over your shoulders, with his left wrist lashed to the far leg of the table. The surface is long enough that his arm is extended fully, showing a thatch of dark gold hair, the blue tracery of veins beneath the marble-pale skin, the swift contours of muscles flexing.

"Tell me, Agrippa," he gasps — and is cut off, gritting his teeth at a particularly hard thrust. He is flush against you, at the edge of the table, and from this angle you can go impossibly deep.

"Tell me," he tries again, "did you ever fuck my sister this way?"

The words come like a slap, and you try to turn your face away. Octavian's free hand reaches up to grip your jaw, though, and his eyes hold yours more tightly still, and in that instant the resemblance is so strong that you shudder. He mistakes this, perhaps, for assent — for his pupils dilate, and the fingers on your jaw begin to stroke down toward your throat, their grip never lessening.

"You did," he murmurs, but it seems he speaks more to himself now than to you; his eyes slide from yours, their focus lost on something behind.

Sweat is pouring from your temples now, and running in the channel of your breastbone. It is four, perhaps five in the afternoon — past the hottest part of the day, and it is cooler in the tent, to be sure, but Octavian banishes the slaves when he means to fuck, and so the air does not circulate. The heat makes you restless, impatient. You begin to drive at him harder now, leaning forward; his hand falls from your throat and his head to the side, and you get one hand on his right shoulder for leverage, feeling the fragile bones shift under your weight, and fuck him harder, harder, until the entire table rocks with your thrusts, and his caught wrist jerks in its binding.

When you are so close that you feel you might faint, he holds up his hand, palm out toward you, in a gesture any legionary would know: stop. Here, it has another connotation. You obey the first, but look to him for confirmation on the other; his nod would be imperceptible if you were not looking for it.

It disgusts you, a little — and you are not entirely sure this is not the point; he is just perverse enough for that, you think, in those moments when some clarity of mind takes you out of yourself, far enough away from the golden light of him. It disgusts you, this act, this final desecration — but you are not entirely sure, either, whether you are disgusted in spite of the fact that it excites you, or because of it.

The question is, perhaps, moot. You are only a man, and your flesh will betray you — and does, all over Octavian's smooth chest, and his throat, and his softly-parted lips. It is with a smile, again, that he licks his lips, sending one last desperate tremor through you, and moves your hand from your own cock to his. Ten jerks, twenty heartbeats, and it is done.

 

*

It is a curious thing, being a general. You hold an immensity of power in your cupped hands, cradled like water: and yet it is not your own to drink. These things you do, the great works, the victories and conquests — they are, all of them, Octavian's.

He is a good friend and true, and you do not, for a heartbeat, envy him the weight of his wreath of laurel, or resent the battles you fight in his name. You are more his equal than you ever expected you would be; more a man than you ever dreamed. You do not forget, for a heartbeat, how much you owe to him.

Maecenas spies you coming out of the tent, hails with a lazy hand. You have good eyesight: this is how you can tell that the corner of his mouth is turned up in a smirk. You might have been able to guess it, anyway.

The sun in Egypt is hot in a sky paler than Octavian's eyes, but the perspiration on your brow has very little to do with the heat.


End file.
